Upside-Down Pear

Tonight, I made goblaki — stuffed cabbage rolls — and that always leaves me with the center of the cabbage leftover — a chunk about the size of my two fists. I also had some medium-sized potatoes that were starting to look at me, so here’s what I did.

Roasted potatoes & cabbage

• 2 strips bacon, chopped up
• Some medium-to-small potatoes, peeled & cut into chunks
• The middle half of a cabbage, cut into chunks about the same size as the potatoes
• Paprika, marjoram, black pepper, & salt (or whatever spices you like)

Preheat oven to 350F.

In an ovenproof skillet, fry the bacon. Add the cabbage, potatoes, and spices and stir well; you want the veggies well-coated in bacon fat. If there is not enough, add some olive oil. Cover the pan with lid or aluminum foil and put in oven for 45 minutes. Remove lid/foil, stir, & cook another 15 minutes without the lid/foil.

I used the same spices I tend to put in goblaki, because I already had them out, and served the dish with sour cream, but that’s just me. Next time, I should use more spices, and cut up some onions to roast at the same time.

This evening, we picked up our farm box and headed home with it. In my head, I tried to count up what we had left from last week, what we’d need to make room for in the refrigerator, what meals I could make with this new bounty. August is always difficult for me; there’s too much food in the farm box to get around!

Since we had a new head of red cabbage, I decided to turn the older one in the fridge into the first braised red cabbage of the season. I chopped it and tossed it into the Dutch oven with some olive oil, salt, a lot of black pepper, caraway seeds, about a half-cup of dried currants, about a half-cup of water, and a solid glug of some fig-infused balsamic vinegar from my mother-in-law.

I let it simmer a bit, but I felt like it was lacking something. I toyed with adding onions, or sugar, or cider vinegar, or bacon, or chicken broth, or….

Finally, paralyzed by indecision, I resorted to the web; one of the first hits I got included all of the ingredients I’d been toying with. Hah!

Ingredients excerpted from “Braised Red Cabbage with Bacon”

• 1 medium head red cabbage
• 6 thick slices applewood-smoked bacon, or other smoked bacon, cut into lardons (about 1/4-by-1/4-by-3/4-inch pieces)
• 1 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced
• 2 tablespoons packed dark brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup low-sodium chicken broth

I had some black forest bacon and a vidalia onion. In a separate pan (since the Dutch oven was already in use!) I fried the bacon, then tossed the pieces into the cabbage; while the onions fried in the bacon fat, I added some cider vinegar, brown sugar, and dijon mustard to the cabbage. When the onions were ready, in they went…and so did a nice dash of cayenne pepper. I left out the chicken broth, because I’d already added salt and water earlier.

It came out sweet and spicy and rich, with just a hint of autumn in the apple-and-mustard undertones.

Nat asked me particularly to write this one down before I forgot it, and I rather think that’s an endorsement. Next time, though, I’ll probably use the more traditional method in the recipe, rather than the after-the-fact adjustment method!

It’s hot out, and I don’t have central air.

I also hurt my leg at rugby practice.

So I’m not real big on standing over the stove right now.

Fortunately, it’s also mid-August, which means that my kitchen contained everything for one of my favorite summer dishes: green beans with garlic and tomatoes.

The garlic is sweated in extra-virgin olive oil, so I don’t have to stand over the pan like I do when sauteeing; the dish is easy to ignore while you do other things, and it’s tasty hot or cold. The tomatoes add a summery, fresh kick to what is otherwise an everyday kind of dish.

Summer Garlic Green Beans

• 1 lb green beans, ends snapped off, cut into 1″ lengths (or left whole, or haricots verts…)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 medium tomato, diced
• extra virgin olive oil
• salt
• black pepper

Heat about a tablespoon of the olive oil on low heat. Add a little salt and the minced garlic, spread it around, and let sweat for about 5 minutes. Add green beans and tomatoes, and increase the heat to medium. Every few minutes, give it a good stir around. When the beans are bright green, add the black pepper, adjust the salt to taste, and give it another good stir. Turn off the heat.

You can let it sit there and continue to cook itself in its own warmth, or serve it immediately, or let it cool down and eat it cold with perhaps a dash of red wine vinegar. Personally, I like to time it so that it has been sitting about 5 minutes when dinner is ready for the table.

I’ve discussed my poor recording habits before. This time, I made some refrigerator pickles that came out wonderfully…and of course I didn’t write anything down. I think I based it on this recipe, but I’m not certain.

Before the vague memories (and the pickles!) vanish, here’s what I’ve got:

Spicy Refrigerator Pickles

• Some cucumbers, washed and cut into spears
• A candy onion or two, frenched
• A few cloves of garlic, peeled
• Whole brown mustard seed
• Dried dill weed
• White vinegar
• Cayenne pepper (a fair amount)
• Sugar
• Sea salt
• Water

Dissolve sugar and salt in liquids. Put everything else in a clean plastic or glass container and pour the liquid over. Close tightly and refrigerate at least 3 days before eating.

Dear self: You have two degrees from a respectable English department. Learn to write things down!

Tonight, Nat is off playing bocce, so it was time for dinner for one. He doesn’t like broccoli, and we had a head of it in our farm box. I can’t eat a whole head all at once, so this was meal #2 from it, just for me:

• about 2 handfuls broccoli florets
• 1 thumb-size piece of ginger
• 1 nice fresh scallion
• sun-dried tomatoes (not oil-packed)
• soy sauce
• chili sauce (I use “rooster” sauce – the Hoy Fong brand Sriracha sauce)
• 1 lime wedge
• honey
• black pepper
• peanut oil

Cut the ginger in half and keep half for some other recipe. Peel the remaining half and cut into matchsticks. Slice the white and green parts of the scallion into thin slices on the bias.

Heat the peanut oil over medium-high heat. Stir-fry broccoli, ginger, and scallion until the broccoli is bright green and the ginger soft.

Meanwhile, chop the sun-dried tomatoes and put in a bowl. When the stir fry is done, add to the bowl. Dress with soy sauce, honey, rooster sauce, the juice from the lime wedge, and a little black pepper. Toss. Eat.

Makes about 1/2 of a large cereal bowlful.

This would be delicious with tofu, chicken, or shrimp in it as well; it would also multiply well for more people. It took me about 5 minutes, start to finish. Yum!

One of my pets has been ill, and had to be hospitalized somewhere quite a ways from my home. On the upside, I got to see what it would be like to commute from a suburb every day. On the downside, we ate out a lot.

Which meant that we both ended up craving some decent vegetables — we tend to eat a lot of veggies, and restaurants generally don’t cut it in that area.

So, tonight, I made a nice light salad for dinner.

Highly Modifiable Green Bean Salad

• about 3-4 handfuls fresh green beans, cut up & blanched
• about 1/4 to 1/3 red onion, sliced thin
• some sweet or hot pickled peppers (I used Peppadews), chopped
• salt & pepper, to taste
• extra virgin olive oil, to taste
• red wine vinegar
• 1 regular-size can tuna

Mix together.

It’s one of those recipes easily modified for taste: take out the peppers, add olives. Throw some mustard in there, if you like. Don’t eat fish? Put in hard-boiled egg or white beans or thoroughly cooked French lentils instead. Sliced fennel? Crumbled crisp bacon? Why the heck not? Put some good-quality cheese chunks on the side (I highly recommend this). Hate green beans? Well…once you replace those, it’s just a Highly Modifiable Salad, not a Highly Modifiable Green Bean Salad. But I suppose you could put some lettuce in there, if you’ve got your heart set on it.

There are a million variants of warm spinach dip floating around, but when I was looking for one earlier today, none of them suited what I had in the house. So I made one up.

• about 1/2 cup of grated parmesan cheese
• a big spoonful of sour cream, maybe 1/4 – 1/3 cup or so
• a few tbsp mayonnaise
• some onion, minced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• maybe a tsp of the Penzey’s Chip & Dip seasoning a friend got me
• maybe a tsp of the Penzey’s Fox Point seasoning the same friend got me
• about 1/2 cup of frozen, thawed, drained, squeezed dry spinach

Mix everything together and put in small oven-proof casserole. This ends up making a bit less than 2 cups of dip, so I put it into my 14 oz Le Creuset Petite Pear (a gift from the same friend who gave me the Chip & Dip and Fox Point…hm).

Bake at 350F for ~45 min, until nice & hot. Serve with crudite.

I have long had a fondness for the small dishes of many cuisines. I cut my teeth — almost literally –on the American bar & grill appetizers, which to this day I enjoy as meals on their own. Show me a tapas restaurant and I’m there, with bells on. And then there are mezethes, more commonly known in the US by the name of the singular, meze. Just out of college, already a fan of the “meze platter” or “mezza platter” from various Greek and Middle Eastern restaurants around me, I found a few brands of jarred mezethes — “eggplant dip”, “roasted red pepper meze”, “grilled vegetable appetizer”, and so on.

Desperate to use up the bounty of my garden and farm box, I turned to mezethes (or their close relations). A friend had recently made Ina Garten’s Roasted Eggplant Spread, and I had fond memories of roasted red pepper meze, so I decided that’s what I’d make (only I didn’t have red peppers. A small detail). It’s hard to roast in the summertime when you have no air conditioning, but this morning was cool and I was working from home, so could make this in-between projects.

I gathered up all the peppers I had — many! of several varieties, ranging from hot to sweet — and roasted them in a 450F oven for about 20 minutes, turning them after 10 minutes. I put the veggies for the Garten recipe into the oven at that 10 minute mark, then turned it down to 400 for another 20 minutes after the peppers came out.

Meanwhile, I cooked chopped fresh tomatoes and diced onions on the stove until the tomatoes broke down, then added minced garlic. This would be the base of the pepper meze.

When the peppers came out, I set three aside for the Garten recipe — it calls for two red bell peppers, and red bells are pretty large. I figured three of my peppers would be about right; I used one small bell pepper and two of a slightly spicy mystery variety (similar to Hungarian Wax peppers) that came out of my garden.

The rest I peeled, seeded, and chopped. I added them to the pan with the meze base, spooned in a little canned crushed tomato for extra tomato goodness, splashed in maybe a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, and shoved it all over a low burner for about half an hour.

I then peeled, seeded, and chopped the peppers for the Garten recipe and put them, the roasted eggplant, and some more canned crushed tomatoes (I don’t keep tomato paste around) into my food processor.

Roasted Pepper Meze

• mixed hot & sweet peppers, about 2lbs
• 2-3 medium/large tomatoes (flavorful meaty tomatoes preferred!)
• 1/2 large white onion
• 4 cloves garlic
• extra-virgin olive oil
• a few big spoons of canned crushed tomatoes (or else maybe a small spoon of tomato paste, or some spaghetti sauce if that’s what you have around, but not ketchup because that would taste funny)
• balsamic vinegar
• salt (I use kosher salt) and pepper

Wash peppers and roast, whole, in 450F oven for 20 minutes, turning once. (Peppers should be browned or blackened on the outside.)

While the peppers are roasting, chop tomatoes and squeeze out the gooey bits. Put them in a hot pan with a few tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil and some kosher salt. Chop the onions and add them to the pan, as well. Let cook over low heat until the tomatoes are soft and have broken down a bit (like they are trying to be sauce). Mince the garlic and toss it in the pan at this stage, and turn off the heat.

By now the peppers should be out of the oven. Let them cool down until you can easily handle them. Peel them & remove the seeds (you should be able to just pull off the skins and rip open the pepper and slide the seeds out. Very messy and a bit slimy, but easy). Chop them up and toss them into the pan, along with the canned crushed tomatoes and a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Cook over low heat for about 30 minutes. Taste & adjust salt & pepper until it’s how you like it!

Serve on toast, crackers, pita, eggs….

We ate both of these with toast and pieces of cheese for dinner. They’re like concentrated late summer, hot and smoky-sweet.

Tonight is rugby practice, and I’m already tired; I didn’t sleep well and today I had too much to think about. All I want to do is stay home and cook things I found in my farm share box.

I’ve got fresh sweet corn, beets, a melon, the first of the winter squashes, a lot of tomatoes. Yesterday, I took the potatoes and dill from last week’s box and made a warm potato salad:

Warm Potato Salad
Boil up some new potatoes. Let them cool slightly, and cube them.

Add diced red onion, chopped fresh dill, and a crumbled strip of crisp bacon. Add some sour cream, some mayo, and some dijon mustard, mix it up, and taste it. Add some salt, some black pepper, and some cayenne pepper to taste.

Eat warm (or cold!)

Right now, I’m making an autumnal dish out of the squash — it’s in the oven, cubed and mixed with butter, maple syrup, raisins, and dried cranberries. I am not much for sweets but this is one of my all-time favorite dishes. I want to roast some of my beets and perhaps pickle the rest; I want to eat up all six ears of my sweet corn RIGHT NOW. Instead, I will tell you what I did with last week’s sweet corn: I grilled it up, ate some right off, and turned the rest into roasted corn salsa.

Roasted Corn Salsa
Scrape the kernels from two leftover ears of grilled or roasted corn. Dice 1/2 a large red onion and 1 or 2 medium tomatoes, discarding the runny bits of the tomatoes. In a bowl with plenty of room for mixing, combine the veggies with the juice of 1 lime and a little olive oil. Taste, and add to taste: salt, black pepper, cilantro leaves (dried or fresh), and cayenne. Let meld at least 1 day in the fridge before eating.

Tonight for dinner, I had a light couscous salad as the main dish, and baked asparagus with cheese as the side. The two could hardly have been more different — the couscous salad was cold and bright and springy, with just enough tuna to anchor the flavor; the veggies in it were crisp and fresh. The asparagus with cheese was rich and creamy and warm, the asparagus soft and melting, the only brightness a touch of cayenne and dill.

Yet the two played well together, the salad a light melody to the asparagus’s harmonic line; all the taste of spring with an echo of warm winter comfort.

The past week it’s been warm enough that we actually turned our AC on for a few days, and being in the kitchen was miserable; turning on the oven unimaginable. Today, though, it was cool enough that I decided to make two pies featuring produce from our farm share box: rhubarb and ramps.

Ramps are wild leeks, and they’re quite strong-flavored. I had earlier used some in pasta sauce and been very happy with their flavor, so I thought I’d substitute them into my favorite quiche. I’m not sure where the quiche recipe I have comes from; it is the one my mom makes, and I have it scribbled on a post-it note. It’s a fairly basic recipe, with cheese, bacon, and carmelized onion in it, so I just substituted the ramps for the onion and went my merry way.

The other pie is called “rhubarb cream pie”, but has no cream in it — something apparently common to many rhubarb cream pie recipes, because I found about 7023948234 written that way.  It’s just an egg/sugar/flour filling; I figure that if there are that many recipes without a dairy custard, there is possibly a reason.  It might not be a good reason, but I’m not very familiar with rhubarb, so I thought I’d play it safe.

And after almost 2 hours of running the oven, the kitchen was still a reasonable temperature.

I’ve had a cup and a half of mashed bourbon sweet potatoes sitting in my fridge since Monday-ish, and today I got around to using them.  There are lots of options for using up mashed sweet potatoes — you can usually sub them one-for-one in recipes calling for mashed pumpkin, butternut squash, or bananas, for example.

I found a recipe for molasses pumpkin bread, changed it around to suit myself, and made it.  Mmmmm.

Ingredients
Dry
* 1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
* 1 tablespoon cinnamon (true cinnamon, if you have it)
* 1 1/2 teaspoon ginger
* 1 tsp five-spice powder
* 3/4 teaspoon nutmeg
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 3/4 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/8 teaspoon black pepper

Wet
* 6 tablespoons softened unsalted butter
* 2/3 cup blackstrap molasses
* 2 eggs
* 1 1/2 cup mashed sweet potatoes (leftover is fine, even if pretty heavily spiced)
* 1/4 cup milk
* 3/4 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F, and grease a 9×5 loaf pan.

Whisk together the first 8 ingredients.

In a separate bowl (preferably in a stand mixer), beat the butter for a minute or so, then gradually beat in the molasses.  Because blackstrap molasses is so dark, it won’t lighten like brown sugar or lighter molasses does, so keep an eye on it and beat in the eggs, one at a time, when the butter and molasses look well-blended.

Beat in the sweet potatoes, milk, and vanilla.

Add in the flour mixture and stir until just combined (by hand is better than in the mixer).

Pour batter into prepared loaf pan and bake for about 1 hour.  (Always check center with a skewer or clean knife before removing from oven!)

Cool 5 minutes in pan, then run a knife blade around the edges and unmold.  Place on wire rack to cool the rest of the way.

Nat claims that this combines the best aspects of pumpkin pie with the best aspects of gingerbread.  I think it’s not quite right, yet.  I’m toying with the idea of upping the spice levels next time, or possibly modifying Ray’s Wicked Gingerbread into a sweet potato recipe. Just in case I end up with leftover sweet potatoes again, you know?

In my kitchen, it is potatoes that signal the arrival of autumn.

In the spring or summer, the odd few show up, earmarked for home fries or channa masala, or the occasional potato salad.

In the autumn, I buy them in large numbers – for baked potatoes, for stews, for roast potatoes – all those things that spring is too bright for, and summer too hot.

Right now, five pounds of russets wait under my table and a pound of fingerlings in the hanging bin. Tomorrow, scalloped potatoes will feature at dinner, soft and creamy and full of the promise of feasting to come.

I was making dinner tonight – something I call “faux-Thai stir-fry”, which is various veggies and a protein and some Thai-style noodles with a bit of fish sauce, soy sauce, and lime juice – and decided some tomatoes roasted with shoyu and sesame oil would not go amiss.

I dressed some chopped ripe ‘Bloody Butcher’ tomatoes with shoyu and tossed them, and then ate a chunk on a whim.

Hoo boy.

I resolutely set that batch to roast, but made up another for snacking. If I hadn’t already pulled onions from the garden for dinner, though…I might have feasted solely on salty, soy-flavored tomato.

It’s sometimes the simplest things that knock you flat back with their flavor and beauty.

We moved into this house, with its backyard covered in gravel. Under the gravel was hardpacked clay, deader than dead.

So I started a container vegetable garden. Oh, I cleared the gravel and amended the soil and there are lilies and lavender galore there now, not to mention two thriving rosebushes and several young lilacs. But the edibles are all container-grown: blueberry bushes too young to fruit, scallions and kale, beans, cucumbers, basil and sage and oregano and rosemary.

And tomatoes.

We came home from vacation on Saturday to find that four tomatoes – ‘Bloody Butcher’ variety, an heirloom whose seeds were gifted to me by my friend Lynn – had just come ripe. Before even unloading the car, I nipped them from the plant, savoring their intense scent, their perfect softness, their gleaming green-shouldered skins.

I ate one by itself late that night: sweet sunripe flavor, sharp tang, perfect texture.

Today I made sandwiches with two more: chicken breasts seared with rosemary from the garden, fresh-ground pepper, orange-honey mustard, toasted Tuscan-style bread, and sliced tomato. The tomato flirted with the rosemary, blended softly with the mustard, accented the chicken. The taste lingered like summer in October.

Two more tomatoes hang glowing-orange in the garden, among their green sisters. I wait for them to drop into my open hand, deep-colored, tempting. (Long ago, the forbidden fruit of Eden was thought to be a tomato, the love-apple, the dusky-hued maiden with the poison hair. The serpent hardly needed to speak, so tempting was she.)

Around here, the tomatoes have arrived – the mottled-green heirloom varieties, the plump red grape tomatoes, the pear-shaped yellow tomatoes just the right size to pop in the mouth. Fresh tomatoes smell sharp and musky, sit heavy in the hand, glimmer softly in bowls on the counter.

This week, I’ve chopped some for bruschetta on toasted homemade bread, eaten slices plain and dusted with pepper, roasted small sweet halves in the oven with asparagus and lamb.

Still a green and white tomato waits for me; still little yellow tomatoes offer up their flesh to my teeth. Tomatoes contain all of summer inside their skins.

When I was younger, I thought there was only one way to cook asparagus: steam it, dress it with butter, and that was that. When I started cooking for myself, that was the first preparation I tried – soon augmented by fresh dill, courtesy of the leftover dill in my refrigerator one summer afternoon. When I began cooking for my then-boyfriend, I added hollandaise to the party in the belief that it would seduce him into eating a vegetable (it worked).

But it took me years to start experimenting with asparagus – roasting it, searing it, cutting it up into stir-fry.

My most recent experiment involved filo dough.

We had some filo left over from a foray (mostly successful) into brik ? l’oeuf, a Tunisian fried dumpling. While I was trying to think of what to do with it, my husband (the boyfriend seduced by hollandaise) came home with a pound of Nevat, a delicious goat cheese. The wheels in my head began to spin: we have filo. We have asparagus, and parsley, and now we have this cheese.

I laid the asparagus down on a bed of filo, covered it with chopped onions and parsley, sprinkled it carefully with salt and ground fresh pepper over it. Then I cut pieces of the cheese, trimming the rinds, and laid them over top before rolling the whole thing into a log and wrapping it with another sheet of filo and slipping it into the oven.

It came out warm and golden, perfect and crisp on the outside, with the inside soft: the cheese melted, the asparagus and onions soft and succulent.

Asparagus and Cheese in Filo

• about 15 stalks asparagus, washed, trimmed, and cut in half
• about 1/4 to 1/3 lb Nevat, or a good chevre
• 1 small onion, chopped fine
• 3 tbsp parsley, chopped fine
• salt
• fresh-ground black pepper
• olive oil
• 3 sheets filo dough

Preheat oven to 350F.

Lay 2 sheets of the filo on top of each other on a flat surface. Arrange the asparagus at one end, leaving enough to fold over. Add the onion, parsley, and salt and ground pepper. Drizzle lightly with olive oil. Carefully roll into a log and tuck the ends under. Brush the outside with olive oil, then wrap in the third sheet of filo. Brush the outside sheet with olive oil, cover with foil, and place in oven. Bake for 1 hour, removing foil for last 15 minutes.

Serve with gravy or a tomato-basil sauce.

I am one of those dreadful people who loves cabbage and will cook it up at the slightest provocation. Often, this provocation takes the form of a lovely head spotted at the store, nestled below the celery and carrots. A dark red cabbage is more likely to snag me as I walk by, but sometimes it is a soft green one. Once I’m caught, I weigh the beautiful thing in my hand. Good cabbages are heavy for their size, with crisp leaves; they are mostly water, and as they lose water they lose both heft and crispness.

Once I get my cabbage home, I rinse it off and take my knife to it. I slice it in half and put one half away in the fridge – cabbage is a tough veg and will keep in the crisper for quite some time. I core the other half and chop it up – small dice or shreds for cole slaw, large chunks for braising, thick strips for soup. I love it with dill, with caraway, with ginger, with raisins, with apple cider as the braising liquid, with carrots, with fennel seed, with paprika, with cayenne. I love how you can cook it just long enough that it’s soft and crunchy all at once, that it is both robust enough to stand up to flavors and gentle enough to meld with them.

Nocturn Cabbage
by Carl Sandburg

Cabbages catch at the moon.
It is late summer, no rain, the pack of the soil cracks open, it is hard summer.
In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.